Square Crypto, the open-source Bitcoin development arm of payments company Square, is supporting one of Bitcoin’s most popular open-source blockchain explorers, mempool.space.
The project is run by the pseudonymous Wiz and softsimon, who will be receiving $100,000 from Square Crypto in a year-long grant denominated in BTC.
“Not even two weeks after announcing bitcoin-denominated grants, we’re giving @wiz and @softsimon_ @mempool 14,043,207 sats … a month for 12 months,” Square Crypto tweeted.
Bitcoin block explorers allow users to browse through publicly-recorded bitcoin transactions. The Bitcoin mempool, or memory pool, is where unconfirmed transactions are stored in a Bitcoin node while they “wait” to be validated. Mempool.space allows users to explore the state of the mempool and these pending transactions, allowing Bitcoiners to estimate transaction fee rates and determine wait times for unconfirmed transactions, thus helping them set priorities with their own transaction fees.
Mempool.space displays the queue of unconfirmed blocks, including the median fee rate of each transaction in that block, its size and the estimated amount of time before it’s confirmed. It also displays the most-recently confirmed blocks, the amount of unconfirmed transactions entering the mempool and much more.
As an open-source tool available to all Bitcoiners, mempool.space seems to align clearly with Square Crypto’s mission of financially supporting such projects. Its previous grants have gone to supporting projects like CoinSwap, The Eye of Satoshi and BTCPay Server.